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Monthly Archives: July 2011

As at Linaro we usually work with many PPAs over the releases, there was a need to generate a proper changelog for a PPA, in a way we could know what packages got changed before doing the release.

At first I thought I could just parse the repository metadata (as a PPA is nothing more than a debian repository), but then I realized I could just use the awesome (yes, *awesome*) launchpadlib, if it had a way to get the data I needed.

So I called the launchpadlib master I know (Ursinha), and in 15 minutes we saw that we could use it to parse the “.changes” file, and from there get the data I needed. As Launchpad stores the PPA packages publishing history, it’s quite easy to get all the changes over period of time.

A few minutes later (after also noticing that there’s a python-debian module to parse the changes file), I created the first version of the generate-ppa-changelog.py script, that does exactly what I needed, and with just a few python lines 🙂

optional arguments:
-h, –help show this help message and exit
-d YYYYMMDD, –date YYYYMMDD
start date to probe for changes
-s SERIES, –series SERIES
ubuntu series to look for changes (default: natty)
-t TEAM, –team TEAM launchpad team that owns the PPA
-p PPA, –ppa PPA ppa name to probe the changelog (default: first PPA)
–version show program’s version number and exit

If no argument is given, it will probe all the changes for the default series.

Over the past month I’ve being working with John Rigby to integrate the SMSC95XX and OMAP4 EHCI patches into Linaro U-Boot, so we could deliver the network booting feature for people using Pandaboards.

Those patches are published at the U-Boot mailing list, but still as a working in progress. While we work helping the original developers to get the patches accepted upstream, we also want to deliver the functionality for our users, so all those patches are now integrated at the Linaro U-Boot tree.

This should be enough for you to get your Pandaboard booting with PXE. You can also script these commands at your boot.scr file that U-Boot loads automatically from your SD card, so you don’t have to call them by hand every time you reboot your board.

In case it doesn’t work for you, just ping me (rsalveti) at #linaro on freenode 🙂